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There is a clamor in Sacramento for “tax reform.” But for every political pundit, politician and bureaucrat in the room, there is a different definition of “tax reform.” For fiscal conservatives, tax reform means tax cuts. The state of California takes too much of our money now and this heavy tax burden unquestionably hurts...

Apple Inc. continues to lead California’s high-tech economy — with no end in sight for now. The earnings it rang up for the last quarter of 2014, a record for any company, were based on selling 74.5 million iPhones worldwide. That’s a harbinger for the rest of the state, Esmael Adibi told CalWatchdog.com; he’s the director of the...

Being close to a one-party state is distorting California politics in unpredictable ways. The latest: According to the Los Angeles Times, Gov. Jerry Brown still holds almost $24 million in his 2014 war chest for governor. The reason is his Republican opponent last November, Neel Kashkari, wasn’t much of a challenge, Brown spent less than $6...

Governor Jerry Brown’s job approval ratings are sky high in the recent Public Policy Institute of California Poll, which means the fate of Prop 30 could hang on a word from the governor. Brown continues to remind those who want to see Proposition 30 extended or made permanent that he campaigned for a temporarytax increase....

Scared of federal intervention, lawmakers in Colorado are working on a bill to prevent welfare users from accessing cash at ATM machines in marijuana shops. The policy of restricting access to certain ATMs already holds for liquor stores, casinos and guns ships, The Associated Press reports. Republican state Sen. Vicki Marble is worried that the...

Physician-assisted suicide has returned to California’s political agenda. After years off the table, the issue gained new life in the wake of Brittany Maynard’s high-profile decision to end her life. Maynard, 29, an assisted-suicide activist living in Oregon, advertised her impending death as a dignified response to the “aggressive” form of terminal brain cancer that left...

(Note from the author): Proposition 13, the 1978 property tax measure, continues to be in the news in California with talk of reforms in some quarters. Just this week, the Public Policy Institute of California polled some issues related to Prop 13. The poll found that 66% of likely voters found Prop 13 to...

More than a dozen Second Amendment groups are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to take up a high-profile challenge to a San Francisco gun-control measure. Led by the Firearms Policy Coalition, gun groups say the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals erred in its decision to uphold San Francisco’s safe-storage law. Under the ordinance implemented in 2007, the...

President Obama said during his State of the Union address last week that 43 million workers have no paid sick leave, forcing “too many parents to make the gut-wrenching choice between a paycheck and a sick kid at home.” The president wasn’t talking about government employees. Most of them not only have paid sick...